Los Angeles is often called the “City of Dreams”. It is a place that includes its own dream factory (Hollywood), consumer mecca (Rodeo Drive), and make-believe world (Disneyland), not to mention a subtropical Mediterranean climate, beaches, wetlands and mountains. Such a myth requires ignoring the indigenous and Mexican population already there. Hollywood helps to sustain that myth, since one rarely sees the city’s Latino majority depicted in studio feature films or network television series set in Los Angeles. But for the Mexican-descent population in Los Angeles, the “City of Dreams” ― that modern sense of the region as a paradise — came at their expense as freeways cut through their communities, and as social institutions either neglected or discriminated against this population, isolating Chicanos from a city their ancestors had founded.

This history is often narrated in the social and political terms of the mid-century civil rights movements in the United States. But the arts were a critical element of this effort, placing the act of seeing on equal footing with rights-based demands. In claiming a space and an intention for their work, these artists offered both a critique of the society and an alternative social vision, leaving the aesthetic as an undefined area to be answered by the work itself.

In Imagining Paradise, these artists produce works that are at once insistent and ambiguous, calling the “City of Dreams” to account, while still dreaming nonetheless.

Chon Noriega